Conceal (CCX) — The Next Big PoW Mining Opportunity
Built on Ideals Surrounding Privacy and Self-Banking!
With the Ethereum Merge upon the crypto mining community, the hunt for the next big coin is definitely making its way across many different PoW-based coins. This article explores how Conceal (CCX) is a major opportunity for miners to earn profits and find a community that is rooted in self-determinism and privacy, which in this day and age is ever more important to the roots and the future of crypto.
Some of the attractive features for mining and joining the Conceal Network:
- Truly decentralized protocol with active development and products being developed and released regularly and decided by the community
- Dual-yield from cold-staking mined rewards
- Community-based and focused on a growing community and consistent interaction with developers in Discord and Telegram
- CCX miners are warmly welcomed and interact daily within the Conceal Discord server and are a vital part of the community
- No DAG-like memory requirements allow for mining on nearly all levels of GPUs
- Privacy-based protocol, enabling users to transact privately and anonymously
- Low market cap, with great growth potential
The Conceal Network
Conceal Network is a secure peer-to-peer privacy framework empowering individuals and organizations to anonymously communicate and interact financially in a decentralized and censorship-resistant environment.
Conceal Network powers the $CCX cryptocurrency which is an open source, privacy-protected digital cash system that mimics physical cash; nobody knows where you store or spend your $CCX. All transactions, deposits, and messages on Conceal Network are untraceable, tamperproof, and operate with no central authority through the use of cryptographic protocols.
Conceal Network is a community-driven, truly decentralized blockchain bank accessible to everyone regardless of social or financial status and geographic location. No one owns Conceal Network and everyone can participate for free.
Why Mine Conceal?
Some of the factors above are major contributors to what makes a coin mineable and ultimately profitable. A growing and developing community, an active team of developers pushing new Privacy-enabled features, and a mining algorithm that can be optimized and made very efficient are some of the key ones. Part of the reason why Conceal Network can be a great coin to mine can be pointed to the tokenomics and the previous bull run trends in the CCX coin price. In previous market cycles, the $CCX has seen jumps of 10–15x times its base price at the start of bull runs, which would equate to higher miner profitability. In this previous market cycle starting in 2021, CCX had been one of the more profitable coins to mine, even with operating costs figured in. As the project continues to develop and grow, there will be greater opportunities for miners to come into both secure the network and make a healthy profit.
Basic Tokenomics and Emissions
In addition, there is a fixed total supply of 200MM $CCX with hybrid emission schedule consisting of block rewards set at 6 $CCX that will continue to emit at that rate until the max supply is met (which is still ~100 years away) and interest from cold staking (more details below). With block times and a dynamic difficulty adjustment, on a daily basis over 720 blocks are created yielding 4,320 $CCX, plus whatever transaction fees and interest yields are incurred. This emissions schedule is designed to be an egalitarian method to distribute coins to both miners that are securing the network and to early adopters who earn interest by cold staking coins.
The project aim has remained unchanged. The focus continues to be on decentralization and the proper thing to do is make changes that support this goal. We want to give back the network to small miners and provide an environment that fosters fair distributed PoW mining for more than 100 years.
-Conceal Team
Even from a spec miner position, this could be very beneficial to have some hash devoted for some longer-term gains over time as the project is continuing to build and develop, and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.
Dual Yield From Cold-Staking on Conceal
One of the most underhyped features of the Conceal Network is the Cold Staking aspects designed within the protocol. Conceal promotes ‘being your own bank’. Cold Staking, not to be confused with consensus-style Proof of Staking mechanisms, is a way to commit and lock $CCX for a fixed period of time and earn interest on the locked $CCX. The interest generated is baked into the emissions scheme of Conceal and will only be available for another 30 years (until ~2048). The amount of yield is determined by a tiered system of how many coins will be locked and how long the locking period will be. Below is an example of an Interest calculator on the Conceal homepage where users can calculate their cold staking rewards. To put this feature in perspective, for miners who sell at regular intervals, the mined rewards can generate additional rewards without any additional operational costs (like electricity!) meaning that you get more than just the mined rewards when you mine Conceal.
Privacy within Conceal
One of the main features of Conceal is that it is a privacy coin that features numerous privacy-enabling methods of banking and communications while maintaining full privacy. Privacy is enabled through the use of Cryptonote 2.0 protocol which is how Conceal achieves privacy and anonymity for users of the network.
An amazing privacy feature is private messaging that allows truly private, decentralized, anonymous, untraceable, and end-to-end encrypted messages to be sent on the blockchain. There is an option for the user to select and have those messages “self-destruct” or be erased so that the communication is removed and deleted after a set period of time. For those who truly cherish private P2P communications, this is one of the most secure ways to do it.
The Mining Algo (CNGPU)
From a mining perspective, the Conceal Network (CCX), utilizes the CryptoNight GPU (CNGPU) algorithm as its PoW mining algorithm. Unlike Ethash, KawPow, Autolykos, or many of the other more popular mining algorithms, it is a core-intensive coin. One of the main drivers of this is making the coin ASIC-resistant and also CPU-resistant for enabling the mining for Conceal to be done nearly exclusively by GPUs. With a focus on the core of the GPU, overclocking (OC) is relatively simple for mining on CNGPU. For most GPUs (recent and older generation of NVIDIA and AMD cards) a standard rule of thumb for this mining algo is to overclock the core clock +100 MHz, and drop the memory clock to its lowest possible value. This means that memory is not utilized for mining this algo. Persistant memory heating issues that are commonly seen while mining Ethash or othter memory-intensive coins is not an issue on CNGPU. The only other thing to manage is wattage/heat generation which is then controlled by setting the Power Limit (PL) of the card to as high as your power sources and/or the heat creation you are capable of managing.
Basic OC for CNGPU:
- +100 Core Clock
- Drop Mem Clock as much as possible
- Manage PL (Power Limit) to desired hash rate — wattage/heat generation limits
One of the main features of this mining algo is that modern lower-end cards can be optimized to be highly efficient. A good example of this is the AMD RX 6500XT Card. One community member has optimized it to produce 815 H/s at an amazingly low 30W (measured at the wall). By using a low-end card like the RX 6500 XT you can have relatively low capital and operating costs to get into mining CCX. The mining rig picture above features three separate rigs combined on a three-tiered rack and clocks out at 37 kh/s while only consuming 1,860 W for a whopping ~20 H/W efficiency. To give perspective, many of the top-level NVIDIA 30-series cards, like the RTX 3070, average at a hashing efficiency between 15–17 H/W, showing the optimization that can be achieved with lower-end cards on CNGPU. An equivalent rig that would be made up RTX 3070 only cards would be a 12-card setup producing ~38.4kh/s and consuming ~2,400W for an efficiency of 16 H/W. AMD cards, where they struggle to compete with NVIDIA cards for pure power, totally make up for it with CNGPU by demonstrating superb efficiency compared to the more powerful energy-hungry workhorses like the NVIDIA 30-series cards.
Mining Pools
Just like many other coins, miners can pool together resources in various mining pools and help to decentralize the hash rate to minimize the chances of a Sybil attack on the network. Below is a list of mining pools as well as here where you can find out more about the various mining pool options available for Conceal (Mining Pool Stats). For those starting out, I would suggest starting in the Conceal.network community pool that is managed and hosted by the community and can be found here (CCX Community Pool)
Mining Softwares
There are primarily two big players in the CNGPU mining software game. They are XMR-Stak and CryptoDredge. XMR-Stak is an overwhelmingly favorite amongst the more experienced miners of CNGPU coins but is also a little more involved to optimize and set up the miner. CryptoDredge is an alternative that is designed only for NVIDIA mining cards and its setup is very similar to more common Ethereum mining software with a traditional batch file setup. Below are two videos from community members detailing the basics of how to get each of the mining software setups to run and get mining on Conceal.
Exchanges and Bridges
$CCX is supported and hosted by a couple of exchanges, to provide some additional options for miners which includes Bitmart, Hotbit, and TradeOgre. The most commonly used one in the community would be TradeOgre which provides a non-KYC, reliable exchange experience.
From the bridge perspective, there is a wCCX option on both BSC and Ethereum. Two future bridges that will help with access to liquidity are bridges with Ergo and AVAX, that is planned to be released later this year.
This article has been written by USCMigs. Special Thanks to TurdBird for their assistance with putting this together.
